In principle discipleship is the continuation of the mission of Jesus through the imitation (hupodeigma) of Jesus' way of life. This implies that his disciples will live according to the will of God, for Jesus was the personification of the will of God. The disciples of Jesus are therefore the locus of the manifestation of God -- their way of life must indicate the presence of Jesus (and God) in the world in a different mode. Discipleship indicates a personal relationship between Jesus and his disciples which is modelled/based on the Father-Son relationship which is elucidated by the agency model. A Descent-Ascent Schema forms the setting for this concept, with the Johannine dualism as the determining factor for this schema. Thus the 'agency' motif constitutes the structure for discipleship in the Fourth Gospel with a revelatory-salvivic assignment. The revelatory aspect concerns the disciples' relationship towards God and the salvivic aspect their directedness towards the world. The disciples have to live a holy life through which God will be revealed and which will enable them to accomplish their mission in the world so that the world may become saved. This study concentrates on the theological perspective of discipleship with some reference to the characteristics of discipleship. / Thesis (DD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / New Testament Studies / unrestricted

This thesis examines the motivations for adopting multiculturalism. To this end, it examines a phenomenon that is commonplace in everyday life but is curiously absent from the academic literature: power. I argue that power provides a better causal explanation for the adoption of multiculturalism than previous explanations, such as desecuritization, and renders justifications for multiculturalism based exclusively on moral grounds insufficient and impractical in the world of politics. I divide the analysis into two parts: power acquisition as a factor that prompts dominant groups to enact multicultural policies, and power as a factor that enables non-dominant groups to mobilize for greater rights. In the process, I examine the structure of power in the modern nation-state, and claim, in short, that it is not only a network of boundaries, rules and institutions, but also an instrument used to delimit independence. I also claim that dominant groups will be most amenable to accepting multiculturalism if it does not alter the existing power praxis, and even reinforces the authority of the bearers of power. In areas of the world where multiculturalism is perceived as granting minorities too much power, it has been and will continue to be outright rejected. Moreover, I contend that minorities are not powerless and can effectively mobilize to acquire greater rights by engaging in ‘counterpower’. Ultimately, I conclude that the realistic prospects of diffusing multiculturalism, in light of the analysis of power, are poor, since in many areas of the world, authorities have too strong a grasp on power, and the counterpower of the masses is concordantly too weak. In this respect, a focus on the concept of power with regard to the adoption of multiculturalism reflects the political reality.

The content of the diploma thesis entails proving of compatibility between liberal variant of multiculturalism and liberalism. Critique by Brian Barry this compatibility denies and understands liberal multiculturalism, which it personifies in Will Kymlicka, as illiberal. This critical view is related to the liberal-communitarian debate, through which are interpreted Brian Barrys critique as well as new conceptual elements in Will Kymlickas liberal multiculturalism that make it an update of modern liberalism. The thesis legitimizes this update, as well as firm attachment between liberal multiculturalism and liberalism through interpretation of Kymlickas postulates that is based on Rawls theory of justice and through establishing connection between those postulates and the wider postulates of liberalism.

Control is a concept that has received surprisingly little attention in the philosophy of action and ethics, given its prima facie ties to freedom, responsibility, intentionality and agency more generally. In this collection I take the first step towards an account of agential control: the kind of control that agents commonly exercise over actions, events, and even other agents. In the introduction I give a sketch of the complete thesis on control: characterising agential control as consisting primarily in the restriction or guidance of some process, and secondarily in the continuous monitoring of that same process. I go on to suggest that the primary aspect of control involves an agent’s having the ability to effectively intervene in the process that they are controlling. The collection itself consists of three journal style papers that, whilst not being focussed explicitly on control themselves, begin to fill out the sketch in my introduction: roughly, I think that control requires an ability to intervene (effectively, an ability to do otherwise), I think that ability should be understood as a kind of disposition to effectively intervene in a process should an agent try, and I think that to build a satisfactory conditional account of dispositions we need to appeal to the recently proposed contextualist account of dispositions from David Manley and Ryan Wasserman. The three papers aim to support each of these thoughts: The first paper, ‘The Anti-Akrasia Chip’, presents a counterexample to the well-known Fischer-Ravizza account of guidance control and suggests that what that account lacks is an emphasis on an agent’s being able to effectively intervene in their own behaviour; the second paper, ‘Getting Specific with Manley and Wasserman’, uses a novel counterexample to motivate a particular reading on Manley and Wasserman’s contextualist account of dispositions; and the final paper, ‘Relevant Abilities’, involves a defence of dispositional compatibilism by introducing the notion of a relevant ability: one grounded by the contextualist account of dispositions developed in the previous paper.

D. H. Lawrence made the final break through the mask of Victorian prudery to gain a full conception of man and his role in the universe. His principal emphasis is on the restoration of man's conception of himself as animal, an animal capable of conceptualizing, but essentially animal all the same. In attempting to restore man to the mindless state of irrational animism, Lawrence did away with the conventional idea of man as the perfection of God's created universe. Lawrence did not conceive of man as being controller of the natural universe; he thought of man as being, like Mellors in Lady Chatterly's Lover, a warden who lives within natural order. He attacks vain intellectual sophistry of the scientific, industrial society and finds man to be a brute spirit caged by the conventions of his puny reason and his self-imposed social customs. Philosophically, he changes the emphasis from being to becoming.

Are we morally responsible for what we believe and intend? If so, what is the nature of this responsibility, and how does it differ from our moral responsibility for our outward bodily deeds? How is our moral responsibility for belief and intention grounded in mental action? I argue that we do bear a species of moral responsibility for our beliefs and intentions. But our beliefs and intentions are nonvoluntary—we neither believe nor intend ‘at will.’ This raises a pressing question about how we can be legitimately held accountable for the attitudes. Given that we do not choose our attitudes in the same way we choose to perform ordinary intentional actions, how do we exercise agency in belief and intention? My answer is that responsibility for the attitudes is grounded in a fully intentional yet nonvoluntary form of mental action. This is a thinker’s reasoning to a conclusion in thought (or inferring). Drawing on the work of G.E.M. Anscombe, I argue that reasoning is active because it is constituted by the very species of self-conscious practical knowledge as intentional bodily action. This practical knowledge positions a thinker to answer the justificatory demands that mark our responsibility for the attitudes.

Magister Artium - MA / According to our ordinary conception of voluntary action, our actions are the causal result of conscious intentions. To take a very basic example: I wish to take a sip of coffee, and I therefore reach out and take hold of the mug. However, studies performed by Libet challenge this ordinary conception. What Libet found in his experiments was that the brain initiates voluntary actions and the person becomes consciously aware of an intention to act only some 400 msec after the brain’s initiation; for instance, my brain has already initiated the process of causing my arm to reach out and take hold of the mug some 400 msec before I am aware that I wish to take a sip of coffee. That is, conscious intention doesn’t appear to precede voluntary action at all – it actually follows it (or follows its initiation, at least), and thus Libet’s studies present a serious challenge to our ordinary conception of voluntary action. This project will investigate whether a particular theory of mind – namely, Armstrong’s Central State Materialism – can cope with the challenge posed by Libet’s studies and salvage our ordinary conception of voluntary action. Armstrong’s theory appears promising in this regard because his account of consciousness and introspection as higher-order states seems to allow room that we will become aware of our willings only after those willings are already initiated.

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Children’s interests are often used as a rationale in child-centered approaches to build emergent curriculum that is tailored to young children’s motivations for learning. Against a neoliberal backdrop of standardized learning objectives, emergent curriculum appeals to children’s interests to foster children’s agency through building curriculum alongside teachers. However, research on children’s interests calls for further development of theory regarding children’s interests as the concept may be conceptualized narrowly in research and practice. This study explored the concept of children’s interests within a child-centered preschool classroom at a private university-based school that implements emergent curriculum. I used critical childhoods studies and Actor Network Theory as analytic and theoretical frames for conceptualizing children’s interests as socially and materially constructed among networks of both human and nonhuman actors. The findings are presented as a case study of a Store project that was developed based on children’s interests in money, stores, and ice cream. Fieldnotes and memos from participant observation, artifacts, and teacher documentation were used to map actor networks acting upon one another in the development of the Store project. Through the tracing of the material and semiotic transformations of money, stores, and ice cream, I argue that children exhibited agency through expressions of resistance that were made viable in network with material and other nonhuman actors. Children sought free interests that circulated outside the frames of the Store project’s currency by networking with red shoes, emptied bookshelves, and lollipops. Even as teachers supported and sustained the interest-based Store project toward real learning goals through eliciting children’s feedback and sense of duty, children offered silence as well as critique of the shopkeeper/customer dichotomy as resistance. As such, I propose that children exhibit agency through resistance in the process of redefining their interests within the contexts of their particular childhoods. Implications of the findings explore ways that children’s interests are situated within and propulsive toward particular childhoods and markets of labor futures. Though non-publicly funded child-centered settings that adopt emergent curriculum are partially sheltered from neoliberal demands on proffering real learning outcomes, they are networked within a neoliberal context through their positions within markets of schooling.

Dissertation: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche about human Autor: Radek Suchý Annotation In my dissertation I endeavour to show the way how the 19th century german philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche reflected various interesting issues that are significantly adherent to the human life. In so doing I try to place their respective views in such a mutual perspective so that both their characteristic uniqueness and peculiarity and their eventual affinity and contiguity would arise as clearly as possible. In the conclusion then I endeavour to show on the example of Schopenhauer what it can mean and imply if the man philosophizes about the man.